The Central Revelation of Christianity: God IS the "apple"

I just had a revelation which I realized was also a remembering and renewed understanding of something I read awhile back. it lead me to the idea that the central revelation of Christianity is that God Is one of us, that we ARE created in the image of God and that God IS the "apple".

The apple is the creation of consciousness which is merely the process of creation responsible for the growth and emergence of our Universe out of the unknown and probably unknowable background and into something known. When we ate, as the story goes, the "fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", we were creating consciousness of ourselves by virtue of employing the ability to evaluate our reality and determine if it was good or evil. Good or evil is defined from the perspective of the knower as what is evidently helpful or harmful to our instinctual needs and our ability to have the efforts of our labor persist and not go to waste. This is in harmony with the notion of murder as being the highest form of crime. As such our being, our individual existence and value, is of primary spiritual importance.

The God of Christianity (and probably Judaism) is the God of our self-valuation. If we know we exist and are valuable to the Universe or its Creator, then we can derive a deep satisfaction in our psyches from that. The world may teach us otherwise with its dangers and struggles. We can even die knowing that within our life experience is that which is most precious to that being who is most powerful and knowing.

God is the knowing being that created this reality but He/She/It is only perfect from our limited perspective. We ought to realize that at God's layer of reality God is limited as a knower just as we are. Each layer of reality arises from something and develops into a system of parts interacting in ways that a discriminating consciousness can model in terms of a set of complimentary oppositional qualities. This is God's out as far as being judged as a moral factor. God can argue with us regarding whether He/She/It has acted morally given Its restraints that it could not even begin to tell us about. This is why God's Answer to Job takes on the form of a boasting of His power. Its sounds like a bully. It actually is logically the best explanation God can provide to us given the circumstances. As such we must secretly realize that we are together WITH God in the difficulties of creating a just Universe, a just Creation. If we spoil God's creation He really only has Himself to blame in the end. If we encourage God and make willing sacrifices without resentment, then we reassure God.

In my study of the God Dream (The God Dream) or the waking encounter with God it has become clear to me that such an encounter is all about the individual experience of the value of themselves. By opening up to the fear of annihilation in the presence of the supreme annihilator, we suddenly experience a compensatory deep valuation of ourselves, a release from the world's de-valuation. Abraham's story tells of Abram/Abraham's own direct encounter with God. Abraham argued with God about the destruction of Sodom. Abraham became willing to sacrifice his son by God's apparent will only to be prevented from doing so by God's last minute command. God became a man in order to demonstrate His love for man. But it also SHOULD demonstrate that God gets it because God is also under the same limitations at HIS level of reality. We can, in this way, empathize with God for His struggles even with ourselves and still respect Him given His unknowable limitations.

In the case of Jesus, Jesus IS the name of God and also our personal spiritual name through which we are given salvation. This is because our own names can be seen as divorced from our nature. Before we even knew ourselves we were already given a name. But to receive a new name from a presence or being perceived to be as powerful and knowing as God is to be given salvation and a renewed sense of one's own personal value even as one realizes one's own humble power. Great power does not, in the end, make you more valuable. Psychologically being given a new name after one has become conscious and is ready to take on the burden of being a member of society, is itself a great blessing. Through that name one is given value and acceptance and a sense of ultimate belonging which is equivalent to everyone else's on some level. Jesus is a projection of that self-naming at a collective level. If we experience our value through God as a separate factor from our experience of God's creation then we have the name Jesus as our salvation. We might almost call ourselves Jesus or at least in the privacy of our prayers submit ourselves fully to His will even while we understand we must personally take up the responsibility to suffer in following Him. I believe the Beatitudes speak directly to this (Matthew 5: 1-12). We can also, of course, see Jesus as God telling us that He fundamentally gets the nature of our suffering...he tells us by showing us the life of Jesus.

From a logical point of view it is undeterminable by us as to whether God is limited. As Star Trek clearly has demonstrated through the medium of speculative fiction, an "advanced enough" alien species can be an equivalent to God. There would be no way to know otherwise. But also in Star Trek we find that that "advanced enough" creature or creatures are in the end subjected to the same moral or social or physical limitations as the rest of us. What we are left with is a God who can truly accept our gifts of love and compassion and not a God that doesn't really need us. This makes God truly a personal being as opposed to an impersonal force or principle.

In all of the above, I have expressed things in terms of Judeo-Christian myth as presented in the Bible. I believe that this myth, as do many other myths, points to an objective psychological reality. Our psyches are the result of the evolution of our species into a creature that can witness and model reality far better and much more cooperatively than any other species. Our reality is a thing which we can hold within our minds and contemplate. As such it's character is as much the result of our languaging of reality as it is the nature of the experience of an un-languaged reality. (See Genesis 2:19-20) Our ability to utter clear vowels and consonants into a precise and expansive array of words and sentences allowed us to become masters over the world we inhabit. The Word then, is literally our greatest power with respect to other species. And later with the development of written language, the Word became capable of recording precise data and persisting that across generations. This is the foundation of scientific knowledge which can be grown and passed on and forward.

But one of the fundamental problems with consciousness is its own lack of objective validation. We receive individual validation from our society. We can receive validation from our mastery of physical reality. But when we struggle to do either through inclination or circumstance, we may receive validation from the nature of our own psyche which can create compensatory images and experiences that will re-balance use when we are severely out of balance. The sorts of experiences and images and myths that arise from the compensatory action of the psyche are captured in the myths of cultures across our planet. Each arises from the objective quality of our human psyche and as such has validity to the knower that sees and experiences its blessing.

Any and all sincere comments welcome.

 

I just re-read this and realized it is a bit scrambled here and there and has some misspellings...

God is the "apple" again, to be succinct, means that just as God created the Universe, we created our own self-awareness. We learned by doing, by acting, and so did God. As such God's knowledge is limited, by analogy, within God's own layer of reality whereas we cannot see this. We only know that God's creation is amoral and we are to try to make of it something moral. That is why God tells us (in our stories about God) to be moral, to have faith in Him, etc. God really does need us and not in some trivial, because He says so, sort of way. It goes at a much deeper level in that God is limited just as we are and we all need to provide each other that sense of support and validation. At least that is the mythic narrative we have from Judaism and Christianity.

If Jesus is "the true vine" and "the bread of life", then God is the apple of our knowledge/consciousness and we partake of that just as He partakes of it.

 

So you believe that believing that the story of the Serpent literally talked to Eve or that this story literally happened is believing a lie and that the very story is, as a literal truth, a forbidden act by God?

 

I'm afraid your language is inscrutable to me. I believe you are being sincere, but unfortunately I cannot make out what you are saying.

My apologies.

 

I think it is highly arrogant to dismiss Judaism as a lesser religion.

I do agree that the story of Adam and Eve is fictional.

 

That sounds like the sort of black and white thinking that doesn't stand up to rational discourse. Why read the Bible if the reader isn't engaging in transforming their personal understanding? This is not the same as believing what you want to believe.

Your insults suggest a closed mind and a defensive attitude.